Whipped Cream Difficulties

The Austin American-Statesman has a wonderful profile of UT geology professor Bill Muehlberger, the man who has been teaching geology to NASA astronauts since 1964.

…he believes it’s important for humankind to return to the moon — and not just to finish the work begun at the old landing sites.

“I think it would be more valuable to go to new places,” he says. “One of my favorites is the Copernicus Crater. You could land in the bottom of it and be within a mile of the central uplift, which brings you stuff in from deeper in the moon. Or you could go over a mile in the other direction, to stuff that fell back out of the crater during the impact, and get a 3-D sampling. You’d be landing on glass, on the melt rock that flowed in during the impact. Hey. We could keep going forever … “

I’m fascinated by geology, but, sadly, not very good at it. That hasn’t stopped me from reading John McPhee’s and Simon Winchester’s books, though. In that vein, I’d like to recommend Donald Beattie’s great book, Taking Science to the Moon, which is the most detailed and readable account I’ve found so far of the Apollo science program.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 10:53 am and is filed under Books, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.